CloudShare Blog

CloudShare Introduces – Web Access: Added Ports

By Danielle Arad - February 5, 2012

2 min read

Ok. We told you once, twice, now three times. Web Access is a tremendous feature. We love it, you love it. And yet again we improved it. That’s right, today’s release includes yet another major change to the web access feature.

If you are not familiar with web access let me tell you a little about it. The Web Access feature allows you to share the web application on your CloudShare Pro virtual machines to anyone, without giving them direct access to the virtual machine. The way it works is for all machines that have Web Access enabled, we generate a unique URL that does not change. It looks something like this: http://uvoa98dbebf6c.env.cloudshare.com. Hand that URL out and recipients will be seeing your application without accessing the virtual machine directly.

So what did we do this time? Previously you were limited to ports 80, 443, 8080, and 3695 to serve up web applications on your CloudShare Pro servers. Essentially you could have 4 separate web applications at a time per server. For typical web servers this was 4 distinct web applications, but for SharePoint servers some were already defined. For example 8080 was set to MySites, and 3695 to Central Administration in most of the Showcase environments and virtual machine templates. Therefore, you had two possible places to create “brand new” web applications, port 80 and 443. In many SharePoint platform level deployments this may not be enough. So we responded by opening the range 8000-8010. This means a total of 15 possible web applications per server, or if you utilize the base SharePoint configurations 13 possible “brand new” web applications.

The ports are already open for you, so all you have to do is build your magic web application, and bind it to ports 80, 443, 8080, 3695 or 8000-8010. Do UAT testing on multiple web applications, test security across web applications, create more, and demo more!